No. 5,555,369: Method of creating packages for a pointer-based computer system
No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface
No. 5,315,703: Object-oriented notification framework system
No. 6,189,034 B1: Method and apparatus for dynamic launching of a teleconferencing application upon receipt of a call
No. 7,469,381, B2: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display
No. RE 39, 486 E: Extensible, replaceable network component system
No. 5,455,854: Object-oriented telephony system
No. 5, 379,431: Boot framework architecture for dynamic staged initial program load
No. 5,634,074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer
No. 5,915,131 : Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services
No. 7,383,453 B2: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor
No. 5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality
No. 6,343,263 B1 : Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data
Is Nokia trying to patent object oriented programming? How are any of these patents only directly related to cellular phones? I see nothing specific to cell phones. These patents should never have been granted in the first place. Should I patent "Object Oriented method of storing information in memory", sue the hell out of all software developers that implement objects storing data and file an injunction to prevent future violations? That patent would halt all OOP software development.
I would tell Nokia to go to hell and lobby my country's government to implement trade embargo on all Nokia products.
I'm a finn but I think Nokia needs to have their ass handed to them in court and have all of those patents revoked.
Sorry, but what part of "destroys the very security mode. that prevents malware from spreading" when you "break" the BSD "jails" is baloney? That is exactly what is happening when you jailbreak an iPhone. It is no longer secure and can be infected by a Trojan hiding on a Cydia repository. There was a version of Customize 1.3 back in the 1.3 days which was in fact a Trojan.
You can jailbreak if you want but you should be aware that your phone is no longer secure once you do that and any personal information that you store on your device can be compromised. The BSD jails prevent other applications from accessing data that does not belong to them.
Jailbreaking destroys the very security model which prevents malware from spreading. You seem to be ignorant of why the BSD jails exist in the first place.
iLocalis is a clone of "Find My iPhone", a feature of the 3.x firmware.
Winterboard is customizable but it is also slow and unstable.
OpenSSH Server has no business on a phone. There are several SSH clients in the app store for connecting to other machines for administrative purposes. If you feel the need to have a phone that requires administration, I would suggest looking at a windows mobile phone. I hear that they have all sorts of interesting crashes and race conditions.
If you want Intelliscreen, it sounds like you would be happier with a windows phone but there are obviously trade offs like no integration with a jukebox and no app store.
MyProfiles, is a solution looking for a problem. It is such a small niche that it is not worth Apple to invest time in providing such a feature.
If you want to hack phones, I'd suggest getting another type of phone. The iPhone is designed to be an appliance for busy people to use and have it "just work".
Any jailbroken device is still vulnerable to potential malware on a repository. I remember back in the 1.x days, there was some malware that was masquerading as an update to Customize for Winterboard. Since the BSD jails security is gone, any application can infect the entire system.
The reason why hacking the phone is called a jailbreak is because it essentially breaks the security sandbox mechanism called a BSD jail. All apps on the iPhone run inside of these sandboxes which prevent access to other sandboxes where other apps are running. On a non-jailbroken phone, all apps also have to be signed and installed via iTunes so it is basically impossible barring someone at Apple not screening the app first for malware to get onto the device.
In the early days, there were some remote exploits that you could use to jailbreak a device but those remote exploits have now been fixed soon after the jailbreaking community discovered the holes and published their software.
The official firmware from Apple is essentially hardened now against any remote attacks or malware attempting to run so there is no market for anti-virus on the iPhone.
I was able to get as far as getting a phone call from the office of the president of my carrier Fido. If enough people did the same with their carriers and their country's regulatory body, we might actually get somewhere.
The majority of people who jailbreak their phones intially do it just to unlock their iPhones.
Here in Canada, carriers refuse to unlock even phones paid in full. Not only does it limit the freedom of consumers but since all carriers are in on it, it smacks of collusion.
Now that there are multiple GSM carriers in Canada (Bell, Telus, Rogers/Fido), I encourage all of my fellow Canadians to write to the CRTC mailto:info@ccts-cprst.ca and their local Member of Parliament to force the carriers to provide an unlock either for free or for a reasonable fee to any customer who has either:
a) purchased an iPhone at full price
b) completed their contract term for the iPhone 3G or
c) paid the ETF after being a customer for more than 6 months
If Fido and Rogers had competent management, they would take the opportunity to offer unlocked phones as a competitive advantage over Bell and Telus as well as use it as an opportunity to earn some extra money in unlocking fees. It would also potentially increase their customer retention rates as customers would no longer feel like they were imprisoned by their carrier when they travelled abroad or went to Mexico/US for winter as "snow birds".
Science in the English speaking world is out of touch with what science is supposed to be about. It has become a religion in the UK, and the US especially. People have lost their jobs for questioning the dogma or even giving any audience to alternative points of view "within" the scientific community. People often complain about the "religious right" but what about darwinism within the scientific community of the US pretending to be "science"? When I heard a scientist talk about being a "good Darwinist" I threw up in my mouth a little. Real science has not existed in the Anglophone world for over a century now.
I have mod points but I decided to reply instead. You have a valid point and I do not understand why you are being modded as flamebait.
Science is supposed to be testable by even disinterested third parties. I would also like to put out there the suggestion that science is unable to definitively state how old a particular strata is using any dating methods. All stated ages of strata are guesses.
None of the dating methods have been verified using a known control and scientists recently had to admit that the decay of radioactive isotopes are affected by bombardment by cosmic radiation.
What this means in layman's terms is that scientists have no known control to calibrate measurements for a "zero" setting of a particular strata, there is no way to be certain that the concentration of an isotope is consistent during different geological events (eruptions) and cosmic radiation can make rock just recently cooled from a new eruption appear as if they were millions of years old.
Finally, the age of the earth stated by scientists is not based on any measurements or "hard science" but rather is number someone made up because it was thought that life would require such a long time to "evolve" to the point that we are at know. Even if you believed that their measurements were accurate, no measurement exists because they conveniently explain that the earth's surface had erupted again at some point hiding the actual age of the earth. Again, that claim is also void of any "proof" and we are all expected to believe it because a scientist says so.
The SLA or Software Licence Agreement is something that you enter into when you purchase software in the same way as when you agree to download a licensed graphic for use in derived works.
You are not purchasing the "copy" right but rather a license for a copy of said work regardless of whether it is a graphic, compiled software or source code. They are all protected by copyright law and are licensed in different ways by the copyright holders. If you do not agree with the license, do not use the product.
If the creative commons license is valid and the GPL is valid and supported by copyright law then so is the SLA of OS X. No copyright holder has to provide a non-upgrade copy separate from their preferred distribution method. OS X is no different than firmware in the sense that the full version is only distributed with macs and only upgrades can be purchased.
If slashdot readers expect others to respect the GPL or the Creative Commons Licenses, then the SLA posted by Apple for Snow Leopard should be respected as well.
If an end user cannot be held to an "upgrade" license regardless of whether any copyright protection or detection of previous copies exist, then all licenses including the GPL are null and void as well.
Copyright holders have a fundamental right to dictate the license terms. When you purchase a "copy" of OS X, you are not buying the product itself but rather a license to use a "copy" of the product under a set of terms. This is no different than when you download and modify GPL'ed code. If you intend on releasing a binary from the GPL'ed code and modifications you made outside of your organization, you are obligated to release the source modifications back to the project.
We cannot pick and choose which licenses to follow and which ones to ignore. Either they are all valid or non of them are valid.
Before someone posts that they did not see the EULA before installing the software or opening the package, the EULA of OS X is posted online for anyone to view prior to making a purchase from any public terminal.
There is no true competition in phones. If you want an iPhone you must go AT&T, if you want Android you currently will go T-Mobile, and so on.
Seriously, stop being so damn myopic. Look around you and see all of the GSM carriers in other countries that are doing just fine with the iPhone and look at the happy iPhone users in the US not posting on the internet to complain about living in San Francisco on AT&T. The rest of the world gets it, SF sucks for AT&T service.
Why does everyone think that there can only be one file system supported by the OS? Keep removable media as HFS+ (what the file system was designed for back in the 80s!) and keep your local storage as ZFS.
Why do you think software development is so cheap that man hours can be thrown away just to add a feature that is unstable and almost nobody would ever use? Speaking as a software developer with over a decade of experience, I can tell you that good software does not arrive on the scene by having just a bunch of code monkeys slaving away without any analysis or plan in mind.
You have yet to give one solid reason for using ZFS. Having encryption being "in the works" means that it does not exists at all or in a stable form that could be included in a shipping commercial desktop OS. HFS+ does not include file level encryption either but I'm looking for reasons why effort should be made to use ZFS over HSF+.
Then don't use it for removable media. You can still use other filesystems!
Most people use some form of removable media. I use a Firewire 800 external drive for my Time Machine backups. Time Machine backs up my entire boot partition including all permissions making it a viable disc for doing a restore from onto another machine should my iMac suddenly die. To ensure compatibility, you would usually want to use the same file system for your main drive and any backup drive.
The average user would not need to expose theirselves to the concept of a storage pool because they would very likely only be using one disk per pool. How is this any worse than having to configure a RAID array with a typical RAID controller or software RAID?
I get the feeling that you don't have a clue of how OS X works or how a typical user would use a mac.
This is something I see referenced on Wikipedia (the sole source of your criticism apparently), but how much of an actual issue is this in the real world? And its not as if Apple's adoption of it would not have also led to an independent effort to create a defragger, if it was deemed nessecary.
Fragmentation, though, is only an occurrence in a very specific scenario. What is your beef?
My beef is that it should not occur in a newly developed filesystem.
I have to ask you again, have you ever used OS X for any period of time? Do you own a mac? Have you ever been a windows user? I have a mac at home and I develop software on the windows platform at the office. Before switching to a eMac back in 2002, I had plenty of experience with defragging drives. I have yet to have the need to defrag a drive on any of the OS X machines that I have owned and I do not even own a utility to defragment my drives as HFS+ defragments on the fly. Explain to me why ZFS is needed given that it is inferior in this respect and you have yet to explain why it is superior to HFS+.
So what do you recommend as an alternative? That's right, you don't have one.
What is the alternative? HSF+ for the desktop and OS X desktop. It is perfectly capable of handling Terrabytes of storage. I currently have a terrabyte Time Machine backup drive and a Terrabyte data drive in addition to my 320GB internal drive.
Surely NASA shouldn't be showing favouritism to Apple in this way, by only releasing the app on one platform?
Are you saying that the android cannot just use the website? The problem with Android is that it is not popular and it is not as easy to develop for. There are over 30 million iPhone/iPod Touch devices out there that can take advantage of this application. How many Android devices are out there in use?
Gosh, am I glad they're not mine: I would be mightily pissed off, a web site would be accessible by everyone, not just an elite, and if the IS a website, the app is redundant.
Wow. You've never really develop complex website or client server applications have you? A website and client server app like the iPhone can feed off the same raw XML data and image store and just present the data in a different form. You don't really think that they type out those pages each day straight into the HTML file do you? They could be running a server URL rewrite command in the config file that takes any request for a flat file HTML file and presents that request back to a CGI script which then returns the content for that request.
I wrote a system like that consisting of a perl cgi script that appeared to browsers and spiders as flat html files but it fact were dynamic and capable retaining session state information seamlessly in the background. Nasa could be using a similar system.
Why do customers expect to continue to have unrestricted data access on the iPhone for only 30 bucks a month without a cap on bandwidth? Shouldn't they be paying double of what they currently are at least? Wouldn't 30 bucks for 5-6GB per month be acceptable if VOIP and tethering were included on the iPhone plan? That would sound like a bargain still compared to the verizon data card plan.
Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer.
Your apparent anti-CDMA bias notwithstanding, Verizon's network is actually pretty high quality. CDMA makes very efficient use of spectrum (which is why other carriers' 3G networks are also based on CDMA technology), and Verizon has been making the infrastructure investments that AT&T seems to have forgotten about.
Up here in Canada, we had two CDMA wireless providers (Telus and Bell) and both of them are switching over to a 3G GSM standard called HSPA starting next month (November) and plan on offering the iPhone on their new network. CDMA providers such as Bell, Telus and Verizon have typically demanded features such as WiFi be disabled on their blackberry devices and have tried to insist on having their "apps" and "app stores" on the devices they offer. CDMA devices also typically do not work outside of North America. Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate CDMA technology. People don't like having the provider "brand" shoved down their throats and being forced to pay 3 bucks a ringtone.
Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.
Er.. they've been offering Blackberries and laptop cards for ages now, and they'll be offering Android within a few months.
Yes, and if you check out the plans the offer, Verizon charges 60 USD per month for 5GB of data. I think you proved my point that Verizon only offers "unlimited" data on phones which are locked down and limited in their functionality.
So tell us, what is so damn interesting about Verizon? They charge double of what AT&T charges for the iPhone data service and it is capped to 5GB per month.
Seriously, if the iPhone is causing so many problems with AT&Ts congested network - Apple needs to start offering it through T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. Share the network pain, er, load.
Of course I know a lot of iPhone users will then jump ship from AT&T - but the overall iPhone experience will improve (well, I won't assume that for Verizon customers, given what that company does to its phones' functionality), and I'd think that'd be Apple's primary goal. Plus the remaining AT&T iPhone customers will have a better experience.
I'm probably going to get modded down for this but you are a fucking moron. This is not simply an issue of a congested network but a problem of user behaviour and expectations. Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer. Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.
Up here in Canada, we have some congested areas in cities like Vancouver and Toronto but the Fido/Rogers network continues to hum along because nobody has an unlimited data plan on any of the "real" smart phones like the iPhone. There are "unlimited" surfing plans for dumb phones or semi-smart phones but all smart phones like the iPhone and blackberries are on capped plans. I'm currently paying 30 CAD for 6 GB of bandwidth which I consider to be a better value than unlimited access to a network that is slow or unavailable.
Some of you might be tempted to feel sorry for me but I have a fast network on my iPhone that is typically around 2Mbits/sec down. I also have had tethering and MMS since 3.0 came out. Even with tethering a bit, I have never gone beyond 2GB of transfer in a month. Most months have been under 300MB.
AT&T should have launched with 6GB cap plans from the very beginning and explained to users that in exchange for a capped plan, they would be getting unrestricted access to the network including VOIP access. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
they do offer an API that allows you to use third party devices with iTunes, but Palm has chosen not to go that route.
No they don't. Writing a daemon that reads and writes to an XML file (that has changed formats in the past) is NOT an API. Stop saying there is an API.
Ok fine, you can take that XML document, derive an XSD from that file using XSD.exe.
Then take that XSD again and run it against XSD.exe to derive classes to read and write XML documents of that schema.
So they don't provide a direct API but any programmer worth their pay can perform the above steps to create the necessary classes.
XML files can be APIs. For example, a WSDL is an XML document describing a webservice with defined inputs and callable methods. I've also encountered situations in my job where the only "API" for communicating with an entity is a series of XSDs describing the format of the data they want. I've used the above tool to derive classes for creating files in the correct format and for parsing their responses which also arrive in XML format described in their documentation by an XSD file.
Explain to me why Palm should be allowed to piggy back on Apple's work for syncing windows pictures and contacts.
Because it's my data, not Apple's, and I have a right to store it on my Palm if I want. Was there any other way for Palm to achieve this goal? Does the iTunes API or Library XML cover this case?
The API can be used to extend the functionality of iTunes. I am not certain if that includes extending syncing features but the XML file is an exact duplicate of the binary library database. It is used by RIM for their Blackberry desktop application on windows and OS X as well as an Application called Missing Sync which syncs WinMo, Palm and Palm Pre devices with contacts, photos and non-DRM'ed songs from the iTunes library.
Syncing contacts and pictures are not something that Apple is under any obligation to provide to third parties.
Would you agree that neither contacts or Photos are managed on windows/OS X by Apple through iTunes? Would you also agree that neither are organized or stored by iTunes in the library? They are provided through their syncing software only. So explain to me why Apple should be providing non-iTunes specific syncing services to third parties.
Trusting that Apple won't change the format of the XML file is a non-starter. Apple's not going to break compatibility with un-upgraded devices any time soon, just to spite Pre; that's a classic cutting off the nose kind of situation.
Please, stop it with the intellectual dishonestly. If Apple were to stop publishing the library within the XML file as well as their binary file, they would not only be blocking Palm but also RIM's desktop client and Mark Space's Missing Sync. Missing Sync has been offering media syncing services for WinMo devices for years. Although Apple does not directly use the XML file for the library in general use, it does serve as a backup should the binary database become corrupt and you can use it to restore the library on a new machine without copying over the binary file. It is especially useful for moving between mac and windows machines.
Slashdot Mirror
No. 5,555,369: Method of creating packages for a pointer-based computer system No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface No. 5,315,703: Object-oriented notification framework system No. 6,189,034 B1: Method and apparatus for dynamic launching of a teleconferencing application upon receipt of a call No. 7,469,381, B2: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display No. RE 39, 486 E: Extensible, replaceable network component system No. 5,455,854: Object-oriented telephony system No. 5, 379,431: Boot framework architecture for dynamic staged initial program load No. 5,634,074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer No. 5,915,131 : Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services No. 7,383,453 B2: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor No. 5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality No. 6,343,263 B1 : Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data
Is Nokia trying to patent object oriented programming? How are any of these patents only directly related to cellular phones? I see nothing specific to cell phones. These patents should never have been granted in the first place. Should I patent "Object Oriented method of storing information in memory", sue the hell out of all software developers that implement objects storing data and file an injunction to prevent future violations? That patent would halt all OOP software development.
I would tell Nokia to go to hell and lobby my country's government to implement trade embargo on all Nokia products.
I'm a finn but I think Nokia needs to have their ass handed to them in court and have all of those patents revoked.
If I were a lawyer my nipples would explode with joy.
Are you using a Hungarian to English translator? I have to tell you that my hovercraft is full of eels.
You can jailbreak if you want but you should be aware that your phone is no longer secure once you do that and any personal information that you store on your device can be compromised. The BSD jails prevent other applications from accessing data that does not belong to them.
iLocalis is a clone of "Find My iPhone", a feature of the 3.x firmware.
Winterboard is customizable but it is also slow and unstable.
OpenSSH Server has no business on a phone. There are several SSH clients in the app store for connecting to other machines for administrative purposes. If you feel the need to have a phone that requires administration, I would suggest looking at a windows mobile phone. I hear that they have all sorts of interesting crashes and race conditions.
If you want Intelliscreen, it sounds like you would be happier with a windows phone but there are obviously trade offs like no integration with a jukebox and no app store.
MyProfiles, is a solution looking for a problem. It is such a small niche that it is not worth Apple to invest time in providing such a feature.
If you want to hack phones, I'd suggest getting another type of phone. The iPhone is designed to be an appliance for busy people to use and have it "just work".
Any jailbroken device is still vulnerable to potential malware on a repository. I remember back in the 1.x days, there was some malware that was masquerading as an update to Customize for Winterboard. Since the BSD jails security is gone, any application can infect the entire system.
In the early days, there were some remote exploits that you could use to jailbreak a device but those remote exploits have now been fixed soon after the jailbreaking community discovered the holes and published their software.
The official firmware from Apple is essentially hardened now against any remote attacks or malware attempting to run so there is no market for anti-virus on the iPhone.
Why not force the carriers to offer official unlocks for all currently locked phones?
I've been making some humble efforts on behalf of my fellow Canadians with Fido and the CRTC.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=817293
I was able to get as far as getting a phone call from the office of the president of my carrier Fido. If enough people did the same with their carriers and their country's regulatory body, we might actually get somewhere.
Here in Canada, carriers refuse to unlock even phones paid in full. Not only does it limit the freedom of consumers but since all carriers are in on it, it smacks of collusion.
Now that there are multiple GSM carriers in Canada (Bell, Telus, Rogers/Fido), I encourage all of my fellow Canadians to write to the CRTC mailto:info@ccts-cprst.ca and their local Member of Parliament to force the carriers to provide an unlock either for free or for a reasonable fee to any customer who has either:
a) purchased an iPhone at full price
b) completed their contract term for the iPhone 3G or
c) paid the ETF after being a customer for more than 6 months
If Fido and Rogers had competent management, they would take the opportunity to offer unlocked phones as a competitive advantage over Bell and Telus as well as use it as an opportunity to earn some extra money in unlocking fees. It would also potentially increase their customer retention rates as customers would no longer feel like they were imprisoned by their carrier when they travelled abroad or went to Mexico/US for winter as "snow birds".
So we'll just mark you down for "6000 years" then?
Go watch this movie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed
Science in the English speaking world is out of touch with what science is supposed to be about. It has become a religion in the UK, and the US especially. People have lost their jobs for questioning the dogma or even giving any audience to alternative points of view "within" the scientific community. People often complain about the "religious right" but what about darwinism within the scientific community of the US pretending to be "science"? When I heard a scientist talk about being a "good Darwinist" I threw up in my mouth a little. Real science has not existed in the Anglophone world for over a century now.
So we'll just mark you down for "6000 years" then?
How is it any different than a "guess" of billions of years? Where is the evidence? By evidence, I mean "physical" evidence.
Science is supposed to be testable by even disinterested third parties. I would also like to put out there the suggestion that science is unable to definitively state how old a particular strata is using any dating methods. All stated ages of strata are guesses.
None of the dating methods have been verified using a known control and scientists recently had to admit that the decay of radioactive isotopes are affected by bombardment by cosmic radiation.
What this means in layman's terms is that scientists have no known control to calibrate measurements for a "zero" setting of a particular strata, there is no way to be certain that the concentration of an isotope is consistent during different geological events (eruptions) and cosmic radiation can make rock just recently cooled from a new eruption appear as if they were millions of years old.
Finally, the age of the earth stated by scientists is not based on any measurements or "hard science" but rather is number someone made up because it was thought that life would require such a long time to "evolve" to the point that we are at know. Even if you believed that their measurements were accurate, no measurement exists because they conveniently explain that the earth's surface had erupted again at some point hiding the actual age of the earth. Again, that claim is also void of any "proof" and we are all expected to believe it because a scientist says so.
You are not purchasing the "copy" right but rather a license for a copy of said work regardless of whether it is a graphic, compiled software or source code. They are all protected by copyright law and are licensed in different ways by the copyright holders. If you do not agree with the license, do not use the product.
If the creative commons license is valid and the GPL is valid and supported by copyright law then so is the SLA of OS X. No copyright holder has to provide a non-upgrade copy separate from their preferred distribution method. OS X is no different than firmware in the sense that the full version is only distributed with macs and only upgrades can be purchased.
The SLA for OS X is available here:
http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/
If slashdot readers expect others to respect the GPL or the Creative Commons Licenses, then the SLA posted by Apple for Snow Leopard should be respected as well.
Copyright holders have a fundamental right to dictate the license terms. When you purchase a "copy" of OS X, you are not buying the product itself but rather a license to use a "copy" of the product under a set of terms. This is no different than when you download and modify GPL'ed code. If you intend on releasing a binary from the GPL'ed code and modifications you made outside of your organization, you are obligated to release the source modifications back to the project.
We cannot pick and choose which licenses to follow and which ones to ignore. Either they are all valid or non of them are valid.
Before someone posts that they did not see the EULA before installing the software or opening the package, the EULA of OS X is posted online for anyone to view prior to making a purchase from any public terminal.
There is no true competition in phones. If you want an iPhone you must go AT&T, if you want Android you currently will go T-Mobile, and so on.
Seriously, stop being so damn myopic. Look around you and see all of the GSM carriers in other countries that are doing just fine with the iPhone and look at the happy iPhone users in the US not posting on the internet to complain about living in San Francisco on AT&T. The rest of the world gets it, SF sucks for AT&T service.
i think it's very amusing you refer to android fanbois, but fail to make reference to apple fanbois who are 10 times more rabid.
How is your opinion of apple users relevant to the discussion?
Why does everyone think that there can only be one file system supported by the OS? Keep removable media as HFS+ (what the file system was designed for back in the 80s!) and keep your local storage as ZFS.
Why do you think software development is so cheap that man hours can be thrown away just to add a feature that is unstable and almost nobody would ever use? Speaking as a software developer with over a decade of experience, I can tell you that good software does not arrive on the scene by having just a bunch of code monkeys slaving away without any analysis or plan in mind.
Then don't use it for removable media. You can still use other filesystems!
Most people use some form of removable media. I use a Firewire 800 external drive for my Time Machine backups. Time Machine backs up my entire boot partition including all permissions making it a viable disc for doing a restore from onto another machine should my iMac suddenly die. To ensure compatibility, you would usually want to use the same file system for your main drive and any backup drive.
The average user would not need to expose theirselves to the concept of a storage pool because they would very likely only be using one disk per pool. How is this any worse than having to configure a RAID array with a typical RAID controller or software RAID?
I get the feeling that you don't have a clue of how OS X works or how a typical user would use a mac.
This is something I see referenced on Wikipedia (the sole source of your criticism apparently), but how much of an actual issue is this in the real world? And its not as if Apple's adoption of it would not have also led to an independent effort to create a defragger, if it was deemed nessecary.
Fragmentation, though, is only an occurrence in a very specific scenario. What is your beef?
My beef is that it should not occur in a newly developed filesystem.
I have to ask you again, have you ever used OS X for any period of time? Do you own a mac? Have you ever been a windows user? I have a mac at home and I develop software on the windows platform at the office. Before switching to a eMac back in 2002, I had plenty of experience with defragging drives. I have yet to have the need to defrag a drive on any of the OS X machines that I have owned and I do not even own a utility to defragment my drives as HFS+ defragments on the fly. Explain to me why ZFS is needed given that it is inferior in this respect and you have yet to explain why it is superior to HFS+.
So what do you recommend as an alternative? That's right, you don't have one.
What is the alternative? HSF+ for the desktop and OS X desktop. It is perfectly capable of handling Terrabytes of storage. I currently have a terrabyte Time Machine backup drive and a Terrabyte data drive in addition to my 320GB internal drive.
For other server applications, you can use UFS.
BTW. I was the GP AC.
Surely NASA shouldn't be showing favouritism to Apple in this way, by only releasing the app on one platform?
Are you saying that the android cannot just use the website? The problem with Android is that it is not popular and it is not as easy to develop for. There are over 30 million iPhone/iPod Touch devices out there that can take advantage of this application. How many Android devices are out there in use?
Gosh, am I glad they're not mine: I would be mightily pissed off, a web site would be accessible by everyone, not just an elite, and if the IS a website, the app is redundant.
Wow. You've never really develop complex website or client server applications have you? A website and client server app like the iPhone can feed off the same raw XML data and image store and just present the data in a different form. You don't really think that they type out those pages each day straight into the HTML file do you? They could be running a server URL rewrite command in the config file that takes any request for a flat file HTML file and presents that request back to a CGI script which then returns the content for that request.
I wrote a system like that consisting of a perl cgi script that appeared to browsers and spiders as flat html files but it fact were dynamic and capable retaining session state information seamlessly in the background. Nasa could be using a similar system.
Why do customers expect to continue to have unrestricted data access on the iPhone for only 30 bucks a month without a cap on bandwidth? Shouldn't they be paying double of what they currently are at least? Wouldn't 30 bucks for 5-6GB per month be acceptable if VOIP and tethering were included on the iPhone plan? That would sound like a bargain still compared to the verizon data card plan.
Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer.
Your apparent anti-CDMA bias notwithstanding, Verizon's network is actually pretty high quality. CDMA makes very efficient use of spectrum (which is why other carriers' 3G networks are also based on CDMA technology), and Verizon has been making the infrastructure investments that AT&T seems to have forgotten about.
Up here in Canada, we had two CDMA wireless providers (Telus and Bell) and both of them are switching over to a 3G GSM standard called HSPA starting next month (November) and plan on offering the iPhone on their new network. CDMA providers such as Bell, Telus and Verizon have typically demanded features such as WiFi be disabled on their blackberry devices and have tried to insist on having their "apps" and "app stores" on the devices they offer. CDMA devices also typically do not work outside of North America. Yes, there are a lot of reasons to hate CDMA technology. People don't like having the provider "brand" shoved down their throats and being forced to pay 3 bucks a ringtone.
Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.
Er.. they've been offering Blackberries and laptop cards for ages now, and they'll be offering Android within a few months.
Yes, and if you check out the plans the offer, Verizon charges 60 USD per month for 5GB of data. I think you proved my point that Verizon only offers "unlimited" data on phones which are locked down and limited in their functionality.
Here is a link for those who don't believe me: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobilebroadband/?page=plans
So tell us, what is so damn interesting about Verizon? They charge double of what AT&T charges for the iPhone data service and it is capped to 5GB per month.
Seriously, if the iPhone is causing so many problems with AT&Ts congested network - Apple needs to start offering it through T-Mobile, Verizon, etc. Share the network pain, er, load.
Of course I know a lot of iPhone users will then jump ship from AT&T - but the overall iPhone experience will improve (well, I won't assume that for Verizon customers, given what that company does to its phones' functionality), and I'd think that'd be Apple's primary goal. Plus the remaining AT&T iPhone customers will have a better experience.
I'm probably going to get modded down for this but you are a fucking moron. This is not simply an issue of a congested network but a problem of user behaviour and expectations. Placing some users on the shitty CDMA verizon network would just cause the Verizon network experience to suffer. Verizon continues to offer "unlimited" data because they know that none of their phones are useful enough to ever push their network to the limit.
Up here in Canada, we have some congested areas in cities like Vancouver and Toronto but the Fido/Rogers network continues to hum along because nobody has an unlimited data plan on any of the "real" smart phones like the iPhone. There are "unlimited" surfing plans for dumb phones or semi-smart phones but all smart phones like the iPhone and blackberries are on capped plans. I'm currently paying 30 CAD for 6 GB of bandwidth which I consider to be a better value than unlimited access to a network that is slow or unavailable.
Some of you might be tempted to feel sorry for me but I have a fast network on my iPhone that is typically around 2Mbits/sec down. I also have had tethering and MMS since 3.0 came out. Even with tethering a bit, I have never gone beyond 2GB of transfer in a month. Most months have been under 300MB.
AT&T should have launched with 6GB cap plans from the very beginning and explained to users that in exchange for a capped plan, they would be getting unrestricted access to the network including VOIP access. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
No they don't. Writing a daemon that reads and writes to an XML file (that has changed formats in the past) is NOT an API. Stop saying there is an API.
Ok fine, you can take that XML document, derive an XSD from that file using XSD.exe.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x6c1kb0s(VS.71).aspx
Then take that XSD again and run it against XSD.exe to derive classes to read and write XML documents of that schema.
So they don't provide a direct API but any programmer worth their pay can perform the above steps to create the necessary classes.
XML files can be APIs. For example, a WSDL is an XML document describing a webservice with defined inputs and callable methods. I've also encountered situations in my job where the only "API" for communicating with an entity is a series of XSDs describing the format of the data they want. I've used the above tool to derive classes for creating files in the correct format and for parsing their responses which also arrive in XML format described in their documentation by an XSD file.
Explain to me why Palm should be allowed to piggy back on Apple's work for syncing windows pictures and contacts.
Because it's my data, not Apple's, and I have a right to store it on my Palm if I want. Was there any other way for Palm to achieve this goal? Does the iTunes API or Library XML cover this case?
The API can be used to extend the functionality of iTunes. I am not certain if that includes extending syncing features but the XML file is an exact duplicate of the binary library database. It is used by RIM for their Blackberry desktop application on windows and OS X as well as an Application called Missing Sync which syncs WinMo, Palm and Palm Pre devices with contacts, photos and non-DRM'ed songs from the iTunes library.
Syncing contacts and pictures are not something that Apple is under any obligation to provide to third parties.
Would you agree that neither contacts or Photos are managed on windows/OS X by Apple through iTunes? Would you also agree that neither are organized or stored by iTunes in the library? They are provided through their syncing software only. So explain to me why Apple should be providing non-iTunes specific syncing services to third parties.
Trusting that Apple won't change the format of the XML file is a non-starter. Apple's not going to break compatibility with un-upgraded devices any time soon, just to spite Pre; that's a classic cutting off the nose kind of situation.
Please, stop it with the intellectual dishonestly. If Apple were to stop publishing the library within the XML file as well as their binary file, they would not only be blocking Palm but also RIM's desktop client and Mark Space's Missing Sync. Missing Sync has been offering media syncing services for WinMo devices for years. Although Apple does not directly use the XML file for the library in general use, it does serve as a backup should the binary database become corrupt and you can use it to restore the library on a new machine without copying over the binary file. It is especially useful for moving between mac and windows machines.